The strong growth in demand for portable consumer electronics and solid state drives is driving the need for high-capacity storage devices. Non-volatile semiconductor memory devices, such as flash memory storage cards, are becoming widely used to meet the ever-growing demands on digital information storage and exchange. Their portability, versatility and rugged design, along with their high reliability and large capacity, have made such memory devices ideal for use in a wide variety of electronic devices, including for example computers, digital cameras, digital music players, video game consoles, PDAs and cellular telephones.
While many varied packaging configurations are known, flash memory storage cards may in general be fabricated as multi chip packages (MCPs), where a plurality of semiconductor chips are mounted and interconnected on a small footprint substrate. The substrate may in general include a rigid, dielectric base having a conductive layer etched on one or both sides. First level electrical interconnections are formed between the chips and the conductive layer(s) to route the chip signals to/from pads or solder bumps on a surface of the substrate. So called second level electrical interconnections are made between the pads or solder bumps on the substrate and a host device to transfer signals between the MCP and the host device.
MCPs may be land grid array (LGA) removable flash memory cards designed to be inserted and removed from a host device. Such MCPs may include contact fingers which may removably engage with contact pins within a host device to then allow the transfer of data to/from the MCP. Alternatively, MCPs may be ball grid array (BGA) packages which are permanently embedded (eMCPs) on a printed circuit board within a host device. Such eMCPs may include solder bumps for mounting onto the host printed circuit board. At present a single eMCP is not usable in multiple host device configurations.